Scattered and possibly incoherent thoughts scribbled down in haste.
A couple months ago I switched my hosting provider from Hetzner to OVH . And actually truth be told I was quite happy with Hetzner. I cannot think of a single issue I had with them. In 2023 I switched to Hetzner from Linode who I had been with for over a decade. I was also pretty happy with Linode for a long time, but the last year or so that I was with them the performance of my VM suffered…
I don't like where the tech industry (and, really, the world at large) is going with LLM's (a.k.a. "AI"). There. I said it. *phew!* For all of the two people who might read the things I occasionally post here, that probably isn't a big surprise if they had noticed the footer text found on every page on this site. Also, my use of quotes around "AI" is another pretty big tell I suppose. I feel…
Just a quick post where I wanted to collect some thoughts together I've been having over the past few weeks about a switch in the projects I want to work on during the course of the year. Foenix 2025 ended up being a year where I spent a lot of time and energy on Foenix-related projects, for the F256K and the A2560K . I ended up forking the Foenix Toolbox into something a little bit different and…
I wanted to write just a quick post (EDIT: Ok, it turned out to not be so quick) to share some updates about what I've been working on these past months. I originally thought this year that I would return to some DOS projects. That may still happen later on in the year, but not right now anyway. Instead I actually returned to the Foenix "new-retro" computers I have, which now includes the F256K…
I made the decision early last year that I wanted to learn either Neovim or Emacs . I ended up actually learning both, though I'm still definitely not an expert in either. One of the reasons I had for this is that while I still really like the Jetbrains IDEs, I've been growing more and more weary as the years go by of the yearly update cycles that the tech industry has foisted on us all. Even…
Earlier this week, my latest tech toy arrived. The F256K , created by Stefany Allaire, Foenix Retro Systems. This is basically a "retro-like" microcomputer , that I guess I'd describe as a sort of "what if" take on microcomputers of the 80's like the Commodore 64. By "what if" I mean, what if, in some alternate reality, microcomputers had kept on going and hadn't been ultimately replaced by PCs.…
Over the past month, I've re-built a couple different Gentoo Linux systems of mine with LUKS disk encryption. The first time, I stumbled through it and made many mistakes. The next time, I made some of the same mistakes again. Oops. In response to that, I figured I'd help myself out by writing a post that I can refer back to on the process. Assumptions As already mentioned above, this will be…
Last week I had an interview for a "backend engineer" position at Docker . The position was for a role where the team was using Clojure actually, which came as a surprise to me when a colleague sent me a link to the job posting, as I had originally thought Docker was entirely a Golang shop. I figured since I've got 10 years of experience writing Clojure for different companies, have shipped…
A few months ago, I picked up a Framework Laptop for myself. This was to replace my 2014 15-inch Macbook Pro. The Macbook Pro still works just fine, but it is now officially out of support for Mac OS, plus it is very clear to me that its older Intel CPU just isn't super great for the laptop's aging battery. I can still get 2-3 hours battery life out of it, but it has to be very light usage to get…
Since I deleted my Twitter account last summer, I have been lacking a place to post mini-rants about silly things that no one will read. So here's one. <rant> I'm generally not a huge fan of strict code auto-formatting tools. For example, stuff like gofmt and rustfmt as well as others. I haven't tried them all so maybe there are some out there that I'd like. My issue is basically with the fairly…